Excel Weekly Meal Planner 20150618

There is an Excel weekly meal planner on my website, and you can use it to organize your meals, and create a shopping list. I hadn’t used it for quite a while, and after opening it this week, I decided it was time for an update.

Excel Weekly Meal Planner http://blog.contextures.com/

The Old Version

In the old version, the meals were entered in a long list, and you could choose up to 3 items for each meal.

The system worked, but it wasn’t ideal. In the meal entry sheet, there wasn’t even a spot to indicate which meal you were planning, if there were 2 or more meals on the same day.

.excelmealplan04

The New Version

In the new version, the layout is set up for 3 meals, and snacks, with a separate column for each weekday.

Within each meal block, there are 5 cells with drop down lists, so you have more room to enter meal items.

excelmealplanner01

Grocery Items and Costs

Another change to the new version is that you can enter the food costs too. Based on the meal items you selected, and the food costs on the ingredients sheet, the weekly grocery cost can be calculated.

If an item wasn’t selected for the current week’s meals, its quantity and cost are zero.

excelmealplanner02

The Shopping List

The shopping list still works the same – just click a button and it updates the pivot table with the grocery items for the week’s meals.

But now the shopping list will show the costs too, so you can bring enough money to the grocery store, when you go shopping.

excelmealplanner03

Download the File

To download the sample file, go to the Excel Meal Planner page on my Contextures website. The file is in xlsm format, and contains macros that create the shopping list. After you unzip the file, be sure to enable macros, if you want to use the shopping list feature.

If you have any ideas for the next version of the weekly meal planner, please let me know.

Excel Weekly Meal Planner http://blog.contextures.com/

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One thought on “Excel Weekly Meal Planner 20150618”

  1. Hey Debra,

    This list is the best I have found in a long while and I am amazed by what you have done! I don’t know if you are working on request and for pay but I am working on a project for a hotel kitchen that works as follows.

    We have many functions where we know what we cook and make and cater and I want to make it easier for our kitchen team when they have to order for the weekly functions for the week. The excel Mona Lisa I am looking for would behave like this:

    1 The cooks can place in a weekly list the dishes they make plus the amount of people they serve (e.g. chicken with rice for 100pax)
    2 The list then converts the dish into its predetermined ingredients (50g of parsley, 200g of potatoes, 1 egg etc), multiplies that by the number of servings of each event and adds other ingredients from dishes that day, that they have in common (e.g. eggs from pancakes, muffins and cookies)
    3 At the end you have a daily shopping list per day (80 eggs used, 50g parsley used, 15kg potatoes used) that you can send to your grocer for the main items. Smaller items you do by doing weekly inventory.

    Do you think something like that is at all feasible?

    Best Regards,
    Sebastian

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